An update to WordPress has been released for both the 2.1 and 2.0 branches. You can get the 2.1.3 release from here and the 2.0.10 release from here.
According to the WordPress announcement, these releases “include fixes for several publicly known minor XSS issues, one major XML-RPC issue, and a proactive full sweep of the WordPress codebase to protect against future problems.”
Traffic was heavier than usual this morning, which can mean only one thing: the Masters is here. I drove by the main entrance to the Augusta National and parking lots along Washington Road were seeing pretty impressive activity. I’m so glad I don’t have to be anywhere near that area this week… it’s going to be a madhouse trying to get in and out of the National Hills area.
Even if you’re not a golf fan, it’s worth it to at least see the course once in your life. (I went in 2001.) Of course, seeing as tickets are going for anywhere from $2500 on up… it’s probably not feasible for most people. I was lucky enough to marry into a family that’s had tickets since the 60’s – when the club had to basically beg people to come to the tournament.
UPDATE: Looks like my boss got two Practice Round tickets for tomorrow. Too cool!
I’ve been following Bryan Veloso for a couple of years now. He’s one of the most talented designers I’ve seen online. It saddens me to know that Avalonstar is offline… I’m not sure what’s going on, but I hope Bryan (and Jen) know that there are people praying for them… Hopefully they can work through whatever’s going on…
The last thing anyone’s heard from Bryan was a Twitter post three days ago:
says — It’s something that I can’t really control at the moment… not really in the mood to talk about it. Thanks for the concern though.
Between that blurb, and the note currently on the site, I’m definitely concerned for them.
Wow… now this truly is the very definition of irony:
Look over the descriptions of the following two houses and see if you can tell which belongs to an environmentalist:
- HOUSE # 1:
- A 20-room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms) heated by natural gas. Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house all heated by gas. In ONE MONTH ALONE this mansion consumes more energy than the average American household in an ENTIRE YEAR. The average bill for electricity and
natural gas runs over $2,400.00 per month. In natural gas alone (which last time we checked was a fossil fuel), this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home. This house is not in a northern or Midwestern “snow belt,” either. It’s in the South.- HOUSE # 2:
- Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university, this house incorporates every “green” feature current home construction can provide. The house contains only 4,000 square feet (4 bedrooms) and is nestled on arid high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground. The water (usually 67 degrees F.) heats the house in winter and cools it in summer. The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas, and it consumes 25% of the electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house. Flowers and shrubs native to the area blend the property into the surrounding rural landscape.
Which sounds like the home of someone more concerned with the environment?
Anytime anything gets popular on the web, spammers exploit it. Case in point, I received a friend request from someone last night who’s sole purpose on Twitter was to show which chores they were working on, and provided a link to a web app they were promoting to help keep track of their chores. Umm, why would I want to read that? No thanks. Some people are a little more covert about it. One guy I was subscribed to started innocently enough… but then there was post after post about visiting a coffee shop and check out the coffee shop website and check out this blog and… Had to remove that person.
MySpace is infested with spam. Try viewing any bands’ MySpace profiles without wading through dozens upon dozens of “comments from friends” trying to solicit people to sign up for a VISA card or whatever…
YouTube is getting awful as well. No one cares about angels sleeping, or any of your retarded chain letters. No one wants to watch your video to learn how they can make money.
Stop breathing my air you venomous bloodsuckers! There are plenty of legitimate advertising opportunities that are out there if you are, in fact, running a legitimate business. The fact that so many of these idiots think its okay to try and sneak advertising into comments really blows my mind. Do you honestly believe I’m going to click your ads or respond to your chain letters?
Think again.
I hate advertising as much as the next person, but I quietly added Google AdSense to the site earlier this week. Right now, it’s only a test, and I’ve tried to make it as unobtrusive as possible: Ads only appears on individual post pages. If you happen to subscribe to my RSS feed, you probably won’t even notice.
What do you think about the addition of ads? Love em? Hate em? Let me know…
In the meantime, if you’d like to support this site, feel free to check out what some of the advertisers happen to be, umm, advertising…
If I didn’t have to have Microsoft Outlook 2007 installed on my system for testing purposes, I would uninstall it and burn the disks and packaging the installer came on. I’m not kidding. Outlook 2007 is one of the worst “upgrades” I have ever used.
I’ve come close to uninstalling it several times now. I had to disable the one feature I really loved – icalendar syncing – because I discovered it was the cause of some data corruption issues I was having. Other than the slightly nicer GUI, there is no reason for me to use the app.
I may just have to unleash this demon upon a coworker and/or a machine not regularly used for production purposes. I’m not sure I can stand Outlook much longer.
I’m still in shock over the news that Kathy Sierra, a fairly well-known blogger, author and speaker, was on the receiving end of some pretty heinous threats online. [See Death threats against bloggers are NOT “protected speech” (why I cancelled my ETech presentations)] The threats were/are serious enough that Kathy has canceled speaking engagements and basically shut herself off from the rest of the world.The Constitution affords us the right to free speech – even hate speech, but your rights end when your “free speech” threatens to take the life of another. There is no place for this kind of BS in the world. There are some sick and, quite frankly, sad people out there. It isn’t funny. A line has been crossed and I hope the sick individuals responsible are caught and punished to the full extent of the law.Kathy, you’re in my thoughts and prayers. I hope justice will be quickly served.Thanks, Jina, for the idea about posting about this to raise awareness.
I collected comics significantly before I met my wife. I’d spend anywhere between $100-150 a month (at least) on them… buying everything from issues of Spawn to imported Japanese Manga to a silver Superman ring. I love comics, and I can’t wait until my son gets older and I can share my love of comics with him (and perhaps even give him the books I currently own). But I learned something this morning as I stepped inside a comic book store for the first time in nearly 6 years: I’ve been left behind.
As I stared at the shelves of comics, I felt lost. Even though the staples were there – Batman, Spiderman, Spawn, etc. – they all seemed so foreign to me. I went with the intention of buying at least one book, for old time’s sake, but left empty-handed and depressed. As we get older our priorities change. Things we loved even a decade ago probably seem incredibly foreign to us today. I’m sure I could probably go back and eventually find something I wanted, but the magic just wasn’t there.
Dave Seah had a great post last night/early this morning on Twitter Productivity. I’m still trying to figure out how I want to use Twitter… That’s one of the cooler things about it: no two people use Twitter the same way. Some people use it to micro-blog, others use it to just update what they are doing, and others still use it to share news and events.
Some people don’t get Twitter and that’s alright. Those that do “get it” know that there isn’t anything to get: Twitter is whatever we want it to be. I suppose that’s why it’s so popular right now.
The real questions, though, are:
BTW, you can follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/cdharrison